“Are you starting work on Savannah’s cookbook today?” he asked as we walked to the front door together.
“I’ll start on it tomorrow. Today I think I’ll take the book over to show Ian, and then go have copies made of the pages.”
“You don’t usually copy the pages, do you?”
“Not usually, but I thought I might try out some of the recipes.”
Despite years of professional training in security and intelligence, Derek couldn’t disguise that look of apprehension fast enough. “Ah. Hmm. That sounds nice.”
“That’s what I figured you’d say, since they’re old English favorites.”
“English food. Are you sure that’s what you want to try?”
“Absolutely,” I said, watching him. “I was thinking of learning how to fricassee something.”
I actually saw him shudder.
“Oh, come on,” I said with a laugh. “I’m not that bad a cook, am I?”
He coughed to clear his throat. “There really isn’t a safe answer to that, is there?”
“Not really.”
“Well, then.” He touched my cheek. “You’re simply perfect just as you are.”
“And you’re a very good liar.”
He laughed, kissed me good-bye, and walked out the door.
“So I suck as a cook,” I muttered as I shut the door behind him. “But I’ll improve with practice.”
Determined now, I opened Obedience Green’s old cookbook and looked up desserts. I didn’t find that listing, but remembered that the British often referred to dessert as pudding. There were several dozen pudding recipes and I quickly read the first one. It contained cornmeal and salt, and Obedience’s directions included this: To steam your Pudding, spoon ingredients into a cotton bag and suspend from a hook above the pot of stew.
“Not the sort of pudding I had in mind, girlfriend.” I flipped a few more pages until I found the desserts and focused on one she called A Sweet Syllabub Made from the Cow.
By cow, I figured Obedience meant that milk was one of the ingredients. But in fact, her directions included milking one’s cow so that the milk squirted right into a quart bowl of hard cider, nutmeg, and sugar.
“Oo-kay, I’ll pass on that one.”
Among the puddings were several recipes for syllabubs, all of which seemed to feature copious amounts of alcohol. In fact, alcohol seemed to be the only basic difference between a pudding and a syllabub. Not surprisingly, I opted to make a syllabub. And I found a recipe that didn’t require buying a cow. Obedience called it An Exceptional Syllabub To Serve a Traveling Dignitary.
Pulling out a pad and pencil, I made my shopping list. I could do this, damn it. I would become a good cook if it killed me.
Chapter Three
It is to be noted that in all meals consisting of only two dishes, one should be boiled.
—The Cookbook of Obedience Green
If I’d thought my cooking would improve over time, I was sadly mistaken. I had attempted a different syllabub recipe three nights running, and each time the gluey mess ended up being dumped in the garbage can before Derek got home from work. I tried not to hold it against Obedience, whose book was a pleasure to read, if not to cook by.
I had learned within the first few pages of Obedience’s diary that she had been only eighteen years old when she boarded that ship for America. And she was an orphan. One of the ladies who volunteered at the orphanage had been the one who’d arranged her apprenticeship with Mrs. Branford, the cook who was swept away in the storm.
Obedience spent two months crossing the Atlantic. Several days after the storm that took the cook, Lord Blakeslee called Obedience into his stateroom and promoted her to the job of head cook, thinking she knew what she was doing. But she didn’t! And she was petrified at the thought of being banished from his service once they reached America. So she worked up the nerve to ask Cletus, the ship’s cook, for advice and recipes.
I was impressed with her bravery and persistence and decided that if she could sail to a wild new land all by herself, I could manage to whip up a stupid dessert, couldn’t I?
Apparently I couldn’t.
The following night, instead of dessert, Derek and I took our wineglasses into the living room and I read him passages from the cookbook.
“So in lieu of actually eating dessert,” he said, “we’ll read about it.”
“Yes, and you should thank me for it,” I said, thinking of the curdled mess I’d tossed out earlier. I cozied up next to him, opened the book to a random page, and showed it to him. “Can you believe she wrote this entire book in longhand? Isn’t it cool?”
He studied the page, then handed it back to me. “It’s remarkable. What are you going to read me?”
I flipped to the next page. “This is one of her medicinal recipes. ‘A Cure for Convulsions.’”